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random_duck

They they are being very transparent about it.

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As every company should, when they have a success. Are they also as transparent about their failures?

Is this a success? There was still an incident. I'd argue this was them being transparent about a failure

They handled an unpredictable emergency situation better than any human driver.

Was it unpredictable? They drove past a blind corner (parked SUV) in a school zone. I'm constantly slowing down in these situations as I expect someone might run out at any second. Waymo seemed to default to the view that if it can't see anyone then nobody is there.

Being transparent about such incidents is also what stops them from potentially becoming a business/industry-killing failures. They're doing the right thing here, but they also surely realize how much worse it would be if they tried to deny or downplay it.

> they also surely realize how much worse it would be if they tried to deny or downplay it.

Indeed. Waymo is a much more thoughtful and responsible company than Cruise, Uber, or Tesla.

"Cruise admits to criminal cover-up of pedestrian dragging in SF, will pay $500K penalty" https://www.sfgate.com/tech/article/cruise-fine-criminal-cov...

Well, as a comparison, we know that Tesla has failed to report to NHTSA any collisions that didn't deploy the airbag.

Tesla report ids from SGO-2021-01_Incident_Reports_ADAS.csv with no or unknown airbag deployment status: 13781-13330, 13781-13319, 13781-13299, 13781-13208, 13781-8843, 13781-13149, 13781-13103, 13781-13070, 13781-13052... and more

How is hitting a child not a failure? And actually, how can you call this a success? Do you think this was a GTA side mission?

Immediately hitting the brakes when a child suddenly appears in front of you, instead of waiting 500ms like a human, and thereby hitting the child at a speed of 6 instead of 14 is a success.

What else to you expect them to do, only run on grade–separated areas where children can't access? Blare sirens so children get scared away from roads? Shouldn't human–driven cars do the same thing then?

I don't know the implementation details, but success would be not hitting pedestrians. You have some interesting ideas on how to achieve that but there might be other ways, I don't know.

>I don't know the implementation details, but success would be not hitting pedestrians.

So by that logic, if we cured cancer but the treatment came with terrible side effects it wouldn't be considered a "success"? Does everything have to perfect to be a success?

If you clearly define your goals in advance, then you can make success whatever you want. What are Waymo's goals?

Something tells me it wasn't 0 accidents, given that it's impossible.

I guess we'll never know.

The raw corporate goals? Safe enough to be allowed on roads.

The less cynical set of goals would be safer than the mean human, then safer than the median human, then safer every year indefinitely.

17 mph is way too fast near a school if it's around the time children are getting out (or in).

The limit is 20 MPH in Washington state, in California the default is 25 MPH, but is going to 20 MPH soon and can be further lowered to 15 MPH with special considerations.

The real killer here is the crazy American on street parking, which limits visibility of both pedestrians and oncoming vehicles. Every school should be a no street parking zone. But parents are going to whine they can't load and unload their kids close to the school.

This isn't universal. The schools in our Montana town have pickup lanes and short term parking areas for pickup. Stopping on the road isn't allowed.

Same for my tiny town. Stopping on the road is 100% not allowed, and parking isn't allowed there either. The school has its own parking area to park and pick up/drop off kids, and cars in there creep at 2 or 3 MPH.

For a school near me, the road is no parking during pick up/drop off times. It even changes to one way traffic. The no parking windows is similar to alternate street sweeping days. There are signs posted that indicate the times.

On street parking is so ingrained into the American lifestyle that any change to the status quo is impossible. Cars have more rights on public property than people. Every suburban neighborhood has conflicts over people's imagined "ownership" of the street parking in front of their house. People rarely use their garages to store their car since they can just leave it on the street. There are often laws that prevent people from other neighborhoods from using the public street to park. New roads are paved as wide as possible to allow both street parking and a double-parked car to not impede traffic. And we've started building homes without any kind of parking that force people to use the street.

> On street parking is so ingrained into the American lifestyle that any change to the status quo is impossible

Plenty of American cities regulate or even eliminated, in various measures, on-street parking.

Europe is much better at this than we are. Even when you have on street parking, they make sure there are clearances around cross walks and places where there are lots of pedestrians. Most US cities don't even care, even a supposedly pedestrian friendly one like Seattle.

Lol tell that to my city. They removed the cross walks and declared the zone a "shared zone" where pedestrians have right of way.

Result? No more safe places to cross, drivers are not stopping for pedestrians when no cross walk. They added parking zones right up to the old cross walks that pedestrians still use (since it were the safest places) where vans are regularly parked and obscure the entirety one side of the road. Even outside of these shared zones, there are lots lots lots of places where parking space is obscuring the crosswalk, where huge vans park right on it, even though legally you have to be 5+ meters away. Never seen a cop give a ticket for that in my life.

One day someone will get killed right there, I'm sure of it, and it'll be mainly the city's fault.

Impossible is probably the wrong word. But where I live, a superficially "progressive" area, many of these traffic calming, road diet, etc. measures are met with regular opposition.

In the UK we have a great big yellow zig-zag road marking that extends 2/3rds the width of an average car across the road. It means "this is a school, take your car and fuck off". You find it around school gates, to a distance of a few car lengths either side of the gate, and sometimes all along the road beside a school.

It doesn't stop all on street parking beside the school, but it cuts it down a noticeable amount.

If it had no parking, then the parents would be parked somewhere else and loading and unloading their kids there, and then that would need to be a no-parking zone too.

I guess you could keep doing that until kids just walk to and from school?

Our local school has them unload a block away unless they are handicapped. A kid isn't going to die walking a block. But its pointless because they still allow residential on street parking around the school, and my son has to use a crosswalk where cars routinely park so close to, I had to tell him that the traffic (pretty heavy) on the road wouldn't see him easily, and he should always ease his way into a crosswalk and not assume he would be easily seen.

"and thereby hitting the child ... is a success."

> What else to you expect them to do, only run on grade–separated areas where children can't access?

no, i expect them to slow down when children may be present

how slow?

how about 10-15 mph if directly adjacent to a school, especially during the bands before and after school stars or ends. route away from schools whenever feasible.

That's how fast it was going.

A vehicle can't go 10 to 15 miles per hour at the same time. If it was going 15, then it should have been going 10. Or driving further away from occluded spaces. And again, routing away from schools.

The simple fact is that it hit a child and even though it wasn't a serious issue due to their safety policies, there's still room for improvement in these technologies.

And since it's a robot, and not a human, you can actually make changes and have them stick. For example, routing away from schools during certain hours.

This isn't Apollo 13 with a successful failure. A driverless car hit a human that just happened to be a kid. Doesn't matter if a human would have as well, the super safe driverless car hit a kid. Nothing else matters. Driverless car failed.

If failure is defined such that failure is the only possible outcome, I don't think it's a useful part of an evaluation.

Why didn't sully just not hit the birds?

Skill issue, presumably.

They've gone to the courts to fight to keep some of their safety data secret

https://www.theverge.com/2022/1/28/22906513/waymo-lawsuit-ca...

as far as we know

even as far as we know they aren't

The Waymo blog post refused to say the word "child", instead using the phrase "young pedestrian" once.

The Waymo blog post switches to "the pedestrian" and "the individual" for the rest of the post.

The Waymo blog post also consistently uses the word "contact" instead of hit, struck, or collision.

The Waymo blog post makes no mention of the injuries the child sustained.

The Waymo blog post makes no mention of the school being in close proximity.

The Waymo blog post makes no mention of other children or the crossing guard.

The Waymo blog post makes no mention of the car going over the school zone speed limit (17 in 15).

The speed limit of a school zone in California is 25, not 15, which would explain why they didn't mention it.

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